Ann Herendeen

I’m thinking of the Jim Stafford song from 1974: “She said, "I don't like spiders and snakes, And that ain't what it takes to love me, You fool, you fool.”

Gorgeous, inspiring art, from Oceania to Dutch Masters, from Neolithic cave paintings to Picasso? Hate it, hate it hate it! I hate it all.

Snakes, frogs, scorpions, centipedes and spiders? Love ‘em! Can’t get enough hairy-legged, slimy or scaly creepy-crawlies.  Read More 

I consider myself a “good talker,” someone who thinks on her feet, enjoys speaking in public and can even come up with the occasional witticism. But I find that I’m rarely at my best in book club meetings. People raise questions that require me to think before expressing an opinion (always a challenge).  Read More 

There was an interesting juxtaposition of events for me recently, the kind of thing that feels like the heavens opening up to send an earth-shaking message that will Change Everything. Then you mull it over for three days and it’s not such a revelation. But I’m going to post it anyway because it’s all I’ve got for material, and the message, such as it is, bears repeating. Besides, my new computer arrived earlier this week, and what better way to inaugurate it than by talking about my favorite subjects?

The more spectacular event was actor/scholar Ian Kelly’s presentation on Beau Brummell for the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA).  Read More 

A couple of weeks ago I heard a talk by Francine Prose, author of Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Like many writers of fiction, Ms. Prose uses the word “books” here to mean novels, and her talk was similar to the first part of Reading, a discussion of the reasons people read, or might want to. First on her list was: Escape.  Read More 

Most of us have heard about “Tea Party” candidate Sharron Angle telling a group of Hispanic students, “Some of you look a little more Asian to me.” I read one interpretation which claimed Ms. Angle was attempting to show that she didn't “see race,” but reactions were, naturally, mostly negative. Nobody wants to be labeled by an outsider telling us what category she thinks we belong to.  Read More 

Readers of my LiveJournal blog may have noticed that my user name is Ann_Amalie. Some may have wondered where that came from. When I first started to write (fanfiction set in a sword-and-sorcery world), “Amalie” was my alter ego. She was a telepath, a misfit, who comes to this fantasy world in  Read More 

Since my last post, (Seeing Blue) I've been thinking more and more about perception in a larger sense. By “perception,” I mean the way the act of seeing, or more precisely, reading, determines the way in which we understand a work of fiction.

“The camera doesn't lie,” we often hear, especially after being confronted with yet another candid snapshot of one's “self” looking like a star-nosed mole having a bad hair day.  Read More 

In the third season of Mad Men, Don Draper's latest extramarital interest, a freethinking schoolteacher, asks that unanswerable question: How do we know what you call “blue” is the same thing I see and call blue? Now a new book goes even further, telling us English has more color words that many other languages, and that ancient Greek appeared to have no word for blue at all. (Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
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My second novel, Pride/Prejudice, as the / in the title indicates, is a kind of "slash" fiction, a version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with same-sex relationships between the characters. Of course, by describing the story this way, I seem to be implying that the original novel is "heterosexual," and that by "slashing" it I've changed the characters or the story--that I've "homosexualized" it. Even the publishing contract describes the book as one in which Austen's characters are "turned" bisexual.  Read More 

No, this is not simply an excuse to say "What a dump," although I sure felt like saying it when I got back to my dusty apartment from my "mini-tour" of western North Carolina.

My reference to the movie star is about her persona, not any particular quotation.  Read More